Stella Rosevelt — page 375: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A CRUSHING BLOW. 369 ‘‘for he does not know that 1am here. Besides, it is not his handwriting. I wonder who could have sent it?” She opened it with considerable curiosity, and yet with a feeling of foreboding at her heart. The Cheshire Gaze//e, she read, as she espied the heading, and then her eye glanced down over the columns underneath. Suddenly she started. There is a paragraph marked. | Her eyes dilate—a look of horror comes into them; her lips grow pale, and she feels as if she is suffocating as she reads : / ‘¢MARRIED.—At the country residence of Lady Sherbrooke, on the roth instant, Sir Archibald Sherbrooke and Lord Carrol, of Carrolton, to Miss Josephine Richards, of New York, U.S. A., and heiress presump- tive to the Thornton estates in Devonshire, etc.”’ Could it be true? The paper dropped from her nerveless hands. Was the deed really done at last, and Archibald Sher- brooke lost to her forever? She had not realized until that moment how much of hope had lived in her heart during all this time. But these dreadful words had suddenly cut it down, as the sharp sickle cuts down the tender grass. Had she really read them, or had her imagination played her some terrible trick? Feeling as if she were turning to stone, she picked up the paper and compelled herself to go over the horrible sentence again. Yes, it was all true—it was as plain as print could make it. But what was this? A new terror seized her—something that she had not thought of until now, she had been so stunned by the bare fact that her lover was married. «Sir Archibald Sherbrooke and Lord Carrol, of Carrolton !” Ehoo = (E(0) <S (EO)